Doing My Day Job on Chimera Linux(wezm.net)
wezm.net
Doing My Day Job on Chimera Linux
https://www.wezm.net/v2/posts/2025/daily-driving-chimera-for-work/
3 comments
> - What's the package manager like, and how does it compare to say, pacman (especially in terms of update speeds and dependency handling)?
It's apk, so well known through Alpine Linux already. Dependency handling is elegant: https://chimera-linux.org/docs/apk/world
> - What's it like working with dinit as opposed to systemd? Any annoyances, any compatibility issues with packages that expect systemd?
It's unremarkable in a good way. It works and I've not encountered any issues as a user. I've not run into any compatibility issues, most systemd units are usually easily translated. I kinda miss having a centralised journal. I think that's something q66 wants to address at some point.
> - Similarly, what's it like working with the FreeBSD userland, as opposed to GNU? Any script breakages due to differences in the switches? Because virtually every other distro ships with GNU coreutils, I would expect a decent chunk of popular scripts to fail on Chimera, if they weren't writen with BSD in mind. This is currently my biggest concern with Chimera. I also wonder if I can replace the BSD utils with the Rust uutils and without breaking things...
Aside from the diff issue it's a non-issue. The Mac OS X userland is/was derived from them too, so there's already a lot of compatibility work been done. Most scripts that are intended to be run by a broad audience already stick to POSIX features.
It's apk, so well known through Alpine Linux already. Dependency handling is elegant: https://chimera-linux.org/docs/apk/world
> - What's it like working with dinit as opposed to systemd? Any annoyances, any compatibility issues with packages that expect systemd?
It's unremarkable in a good way. It works and I've not encountered any issues as a user. I've not run into any compatibility issues, most systemd units are usually easily translated. I kinda miss having a centralised journal. I think that's something q66 wants to address at some point.
> - Similarly, what's it like working with the FreeBSD userland, as opposed to GNU? Any script breakages due to differences in the switches? Because virtually every other distro ships with GNU coreutils, I would expect a decent chunk of popular scripts to fail on Chimera, if they weren't writen with BSD in mind. This is currently my biggest concern with Chimera. I also wonder if I can replace the BSD utils with the Rust uutils and without breaking things...
Aside from the diff issue it's a non-issue. The Mac OS X userland is/was derived from them too, so there's already a lot of compatibility work been done. Most scripts that are intended to be run by a broad audience already stick to POSIX features.
I tried Chimera Linux a while back. I get that they’re going for a FreeBSD-like vibe with the ported userland and all, but not being able to use my NVIDIA GPU killed my interest. Also, it just felt kinda slow — no hard numbers, just my impression.
Although I wish the author commented about the experiences around the unique (administrative) bits of Chimera itself, such as:
- What's the package manager like, and how does it compare to say, pacman (especially in terms of update speeds and dependency handling)?
- What's it like working with dinit as opposed to systemd? Any annoyances, any compatibility issues with packages that expect systemd?
- Similarly, what's it like working with the FreeBSD userland, as opposed to GNU? Any script breakages due to differences in the switches? Because virtually every other distro ships with GNU coreutils, I would expect a decent chunk of popular scripts to fail on Chimera, if they weren't writen with BSD in mind. This is currently my biggest concern with Chimera. I also wonder if I can replace the BSD utils with the Rust uutils and without breaking things...